How do you decide what to read? Assuming the novel isn't by an author so well known that nothing else matters, the cover is a key influence with the description a close second. The potential reader is likely to then open the book to check out the first few lines.

I'm delighted to be joined by five fellow authors to outline how we decided on the opening sentences in one of our novels.

"I wish I didn’t know, she thought. I wish I’d never found out. I wish I could be the person I was this morning, before we sat down to our stitching."

Dangerous Women has taken three years to write and during that time, what I thought was the first line of the book has changed several times. At first, I thought I was writing a straight historical novel, and the book began with the convict women boarding the ship that would transport them to Australia. Then I was taken on by a new agent, Nelle Andrew, who persuaded me that I should add a crime and a ticking clock to my story. Would we find out who had wielded the knife in a brutal stabbing?

Both my UK and USA publishers are part of the Penguin Group and my editors worked together on the manuscript. After moving about of great slabs of text and trying many different openings, we agreed that the most high-impact way to start the book would be with the stabbing itself. It’s dramatic and takes the reader straight into the action.

"Today, Poppy Orpington is hardly remembered at all."

The above first line in Full Throttle is (of course) designed to hook the reader; who was Poppy, and why has she been forgotten? But we may also ask who is telling us about Poppy? Who is addressing us so directly?

The in-universe answer is a contemporary editor, James Birkin, telling Poppy’s story to clear her name of allegations of treason in war-time Europe. But the real reason? It appears from online reviews and editorial feedback that the “third person omniscient” narrator is falling out of fashion. In its place is the “third person limited”, which is limiting indeed as the narrator cannot know anything the characters don’t know.

Hence this set-up, in which Birkin is drawing on personal diaries, letters, news reports etc to reconstruct Poppy’s life and times, and thus he does (thankfully) know more than the characters do.

Though this approach does then raise the issue of the unreliable narrator…

"Some events shift the world on its axis and things are never the same again. A birth. A death. A diagnosis."

Is it possible to fully understand events as we’re living through them? Thinking of coronavirus, it may only be after the crisis has subsided that we’ll be able to tell ourselves stories of our experience that make sense. And it’s the same for the heroine in my novel - Gina's Therapy - who, following a diagnosis of cancer, is thrown headlong into the world of surgery, chemo and support groups. But through telling her story she finds peace, surprising and entertaining readers with what she’s learned about love, family and friendship.

So, these opening lines are important, framing the story that’s about to unfold, hinting at momentous events that will change one woman’s existence forever. Life may never be the same again, but could it be better? Could it be sweeter? First lines should entice the reader to find out more.